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Concepts and Meanings of Community in the Social Sciences Connected Communities Concepts and meanings of community in the social sciences Discussion Paper Valerie Walkerdine and David Studdert 1 CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNITY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Concepts and meanings of community in the social sciences Discussion Paper Valerie Walkerdine and David Studdert Executive Summary The project „Concepts and meanings of community in the social sciences‟ undertook to produce a conceptual review, linking theoretical underpinnings with the usage of the concepts of community in empirical research and describing the manner in which these conceptualisations appear in government and non-government sector policies and practices. The review mapped key academic texts across 9 disciplines and fields since the 1960s. It reviewed the ways in which key conceptualizations appeared in empirical articles within these fields and disciplines and also appeared within government, NGO and voluntary sector websites, where community was an explicit aspect of the organisation‟s brief. The review showed that while there is a sophisticated history of debate and investigation within a few key disciplines, there has been a paucity of concepts used within empirical research, applied fields and policy websites. The impact of this is to make community into a „spray-on term‟, in which there is little reference to concepts but in which implicit meanings emphasize the significance of community as an object and downplay the importance of social relations and experience. The implications of this for research, policy and practice are profound: we badly need research which allows community as action to be conceptualized in ways which understand and thus support action by community members, central to the localism agenda. Researchers and Project Partners Valerie Walkerdine and David Studdert Key words community, concepts, meanings, social sciences 2 CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNITY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Introduction Review The conceptualization of community is usually taken as beginning in the 19th century, when concern about the effects of social cohesion related to the social displacement following industrialization was at its height. Sociology, anthropology and social psychology have the most developed history in the social sciences, but thinking has fluctuated over time, with debates about the usefulness of the term itself and concerns about shifts from contained geographical locations where kinship ties keep people together, through to the symbolic ties that bind them and more recently to the interest ties that bring people together even if geographically distant. Disciplines and fields In understanding the contributions of disciplines and fields within the social sciences, the disciplines have supplied concepts, while the fields generally offer meanings derived from the disciplines in their applied work. We considered five disciplines: anthropology, geography, cultural studies, social psychology and sociology. Anthropology is the key social science discipline for understanding community, with work from the Chicago School and structural functionalism dominating the period up to the 1960s, but this came under sustained attack from the 1970s onwards by a turn to the symbolic and discursive (Cohen, 1985; Anderson, 1983; Basch et al, 1994; Hannerz, 1996). The implications of this were to downplay the importance of face-to-face interaction and to emphasize the centrality of community of interest, in which community functions simply as a referent (Amit and Rapport, 2002). Where anthropology has stressed the centrality of meanings, we might also point to feelings in common, as conceptualized within social psychology (Sarason, 1974; Nelson and Prilleltensky, 2010) and how those are generated by actions in common across a range of interrelated fields – which stress the centrality of a feeling of belonging, exclusion, the possibility of going on being. From sociological conceptualizations, we learn about the centrality of two well-known American concepts – social capital and communitarianism. In the wider historical context, both can be seen as modifications of Structural Functionalism. In the last thirty years Cultural studies has provided the social sciences with much of the underlying thematic approaches, particularly in relation to subjectivity and community of interest. Conversely, Geography tends to adapt its notions of community from other disciplines, particularly sociology and anthropology. One of the most important distinctions made is between community as an object and community as action, activity, process. The former is most obvious in sociological work, especially social capital and communitarianism, whereas community as activity and process is much more common within anthropology and social psychology. 3 CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNITY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Fields: Education Health Online communities Community studies Policing If we take all these applied fields together, there is a massive amount of academic work but in most of it community functions as a referent, which relates strongly to either location or interest. In particular, concepts from social capital and communitarianism are applied to these fields, except for some recent work in policing (Hughes, 2007) which acknowledges that community meanings and the state may not be synonymous. In most of the work, the term community functions as what Rose (1999) described as a „feel good‟ term. Policy documents and websites The websites and materials reviewed overwhelmingly operate with certain key terms: community development, empowerment, engagement and participation, with an emphasis on active participation. Members of communities are often addressed as citizens or the public, terms which have a different historical meaning from the term community, thus rather undercutting the initial appeal to community. Above all, activities which relate to empowerment and participation are about supporting communities to be able to take part in the decision-making of the local governance infrastructure, to be able to express their needs and demands and to be able to challenge where necessary. This is understood as especially supporting and enabling those in marginalized groups and communities to take part. It is sometimes acknowledged that a community has many different facets, and that people belong to different communities at once, such as location, plus faith plus other interest. Thus, the definition of community, while primarily about a bounded geographical area (often a local authority), does operate with a nuanced view of constituency. Where conceptual apparatuses are referred to, this is usually a reference to Social Capital. Policy and practice workshop As part of the project‟s dissemination activities, a one-day workshop brought together policy makers, community activists and the project academic advisory group. A number of key issues emerged from this discussion: 4 CONCEPTS AND MEANINGS OF COMMUNITY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 1. A strong distinction needs to be made between policy that relates to the implementation of a political agenda and community activism undertaken by voluntary groups, which tends to operate on an asset-based approach, which uses a framework of listening what a locality wants. 2. There is a real problem for academic research in relation to partnerships with policy and grass roots organizations, in terms of timescale. Academic research takes a long time to get funded and to be undertaken. This does not fit well with an agenda that demands rapid response and change. It is therefore a challenge to think about how researchers and policy makers and practitioners can fruitfully work together for mutual gain. 3. While there may be implicit references to key theories such as social capital and communitarianism within policy and practice literature, the constraints are twofold: having to operate to a political agenda, fixed in manifesto commitments and having to respond on the ground to that agenda as the starting point for thinking about what is being demanded by the community concerned. Discussion The review demonstrates that the term Community has many meanings in the literature but little concrete presence. As such, the term continues to be used, not because of its usefulness to academics, but because of its continued resonance with policymakers and the public. We discovered in the applied fields and the stake-holder websites that community was rarely conceptualised and was often established as a fact through the use of very traditional social science descriptors like „location‟ and „interest‟, often utilised in a reductionist manner as a given which required no further engagement. In the theoretical work, community was frequently discussed, yet books, chapters and papers followed a familiar groove, in which the past failure of attempts to define it and the general failure of structural functionalism, were presented as the final word, justifying the term‟s confused and unhelpful status. Typically, following a dedicated chapter or section, the word community would feature throughout the pages following, in whatever meaning resonated in that particular context or in whatever form supported the argument at the time. In short, there were a lot of critiques of previous work, but little attempt to offer or even to think about possible alternative conceptualisations. Indeed this lack of definition is endemic across the literature: communitarians for instance are famous for never defining community while constantly evoking it (Rasmussen, 1990),
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